The Media Representation Strategies of Female Athletes in Different Types of Sports: Taking London 2012 Summer Olympic for Example

• Main Authors: Shiuan Miao, 繆萱
• Other Authors: Ming-Chu Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/34837208272000421338

碩士 === 世新大學 === 性別研究所 === 101 === Previous researches focus on the media representation strategies of female athletes are mostly in connection with gender difference, demonstrating how the media represent the male athletes and the female athletes, and analyze the gender ideology of these strategies. However, those researches assume all of the female athletes to be a classification with homogeneity; in other words, the sports media apply the same representation strategy to exclude “the other” from the sports field and ignore the heterogeneity that the female athletes may have. Therefore, this study focuses on how the types of sports affect the media representation strategies. With classifying the types of sports which the female athletes engage in into socially approved sports and non-socially approved sports, this study employs content analysis and discourse analysis to investigate the differences of the media representation strategies of the female athletes who participate in these two types of sports, and how the media discourses consolidate or undermine the masculinities which the sports field has advocated. The investigation result suggests that the quantity of coverage of non-socially approved sports is slight more than the socially approved sports, but the media did not particularly use great length and the upper space of the whole page for the non-socially approved sports, which is the type of sports that the Chinese Taipei team had gotten a silver medal and a bronze medal. In the aspect of the patterns of discourse, the sports media have the tendency to give the female athletes who participate in socially approved sports some nicknames to emphasize their femininity, describing their appearances with sexual implication, and demonstrate the aspect that they have already met the social expectations. For those female athletes who participate in non-socially approved sports, the sports media have the tendency to give them some titles to stress their sports talent or masculinity, intimating their lack of femininity, and emphasize the social expectations for women that they have not yet completed. The two different discourse patterns characterize female athletes as “the second sex” in the sports field simultaneously, and consolidate the domination of masculinities in the sports field.